I love to run sound for our church’s worship services.  It is a blast for me to work with the band, listening for the various nuances that bring out the beauty and power of a certain song or phrase.  But in simple terms, my job is to make things loud enough for people to hear them.  Oh but it gets better, I don’t want them to just hear it.  I want them to feel it, in their bones, in their souls.

A mistake made by newcomers to sound technology is to always elevate the sound.  By that I mean that a good bass part comes up so they push the sound of the bass, then a lead guitar part is due so they increase the volume of the lead, but then the keys are getting buried so they raise that up.  Before you know it the volume is at 120 decibels and no one can hear anything, certainly not the words to the song.  Part of what is difficult for even more experienced  technicians is knowing when and how to back off the sound of the instruments.

And before I lose too many of you, there is a word here from the Lord for all of us in this.

Loud getting louder is just loud.  Emotion getting more emotional is just emotion.  Worship that has the freedom to be quiet, the openness to invite God’s presence, will find His movement, His heart.  If, in our singing, we can not stop to listen for His voice, we will miss Him.

And the awesome wonder of our relationship with Him is that as we open up our hearts, create space for our lives to be joined with His, it then can build, together, to the moments, the rapturous places where time and space lose all meaning.  The locus where divine and human, eternal and finite join for the reason we were all created, to love and be loved.